Wha..?? A last Cats With Hands? Yes.
It seems Joe Martin has stopped producing new Cats With Hands strips and panels.
(Joe continues creating Mr. Boffo and Willy ‘n Ethel comics.)
Last month Neatly Chiseled Features started issuing “The Best of Cats With Hands” dailies beginning March 16, 2020. That strip was a rerun of the October 31, 2005 strip – the first date when Joe began syndicating his own creations after leaving Tribune Media.
above: the first “Best of Cats With Hands” daily panel (via Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
CATS WITH HANDS
by Joe Martin
Sundays: September 12, 1999 – March 22, 2020*
dailies: September 13, 1999 – March 14, 2020
Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media Syndicate/Neatly Chiseled Features
above: the first Cats With Hands daily panel
below: the last Cats With Hands daily panel
above: the first Cats With Hands Sunday strip
below: the last* Cats With Hands Sunday strip
* The Sunday Cats With Hands ran two last Sundays past March 22 – March 29, 2020 and April 5, 2020. They were copyrighted 2020 and carried the current date (unlike The Best of Cats With Hands dailies), but in the upper left corner there was a “Best of” added.
Were these “Best of” Sunday strips reruns or new?
Joe Martin photo from a 2015 Wilmington Star News profile.
to Mark Jackson for the heads-up
The ended newspaper comic strips in 2020 so far: Ask Shagg, The Pajama Diaries, Retail, Moose (Miller) and Molly, and now Cats with Hands. Although there’s still no official end to all rerun mode for a year daily and Sunday Get Fuzzy as of yet.